American History Revised (35 page)

Even our most popular war—World War II—had its conscription problems. The United States Army in 1936 ranked twenty-first in the world in size, right behind the armies of Argentina and Switzerland. In 1938 the Ludlow Amendment, requiring that any declaration of war first be subject to popular referendum, fell just 5 percent short of being presented to Congress for a vote as a constitutional amendment. In late 1941, with fighting raging throughout Europe, and China being overrun by Japan, a desperate President Roosevelt urged Congress to renew the one-year draft law. The law passed, but by only one vote.

A one-time freakish period of isolationism? Hardly. During the middle of the war, the U.S. troop contribution was far less than Great Britain’s. FDR made continual requests for more troops; most times Congress turned him down.

Not having enough soldiers is a common American dilemma—and a brake against militarism.

1776–1945
Most historians—and certainly the general public reading the newspapers—think of war as a series of
battles. You win the encounters of battle—ergo, you win the war. Trenton, Saratoga, and Yorktown form convenient reference points in the American Revolution, just as Pearl Harbor, Midway, and Normandy do in World War II.

Julius Caesar thought differently. He preferred “conquering the foe by hunger rather than by steel.” Combat had its place, but more important was logistics: depriving the enemy by conquering agricultural territory, destroying supply lines, and blocking off areas where potential recruits lived.

There is no glory in logistics, but logistics explains all three of America’s great military victories:

In what was America’s longest declared war—eight years—supplies became a critical issue for both sides. In the first year the American rebels had only nine cartridges per man. In the June 1775 fight for Bunker Hill, the colonists were so low on gunpowder they had to combat the British hand-to-hand with the butt ends of their muskets. When Washington took his army out of New York and into New Jersey and Pennsylvania, chased by the British, who were drawn away from their ships in the seaports, both sides ransacked the countryside mercilessly. Jeremiah Wadsworth, a Hartford merchant, earned the sobriquet of “the quartermaster of the Revolution” for his entrepreneurial ingenuity in arranging for enormous amounts of food, hay, horses, wagons, and teamsters for the Continental Army.

The British counted on their powerful navy to block colonial trade and to keep their own army well supplied. It was not to be. The British navy lacked the resources to bottle up the entire American coast, and American merchantmen—a larger force than the entire Continental Army—harassed British ships all the way from the North Atlantic to the Caribbean. More than two thousand British ships were captured, thoroughly disrupting British supply lines.

Both sides, the North particularly, required massive amounts of food, hay, horses, mules, rifles, gunpowder, hospital supplies, and myriad other items needed for a mobile fighting force.

The Northern generals had the benefit of a secretary of war and a legion of quartermasters and railroad executives who were excellent managers and could deliver goods and supplies to the Northern armies quickly. Their challenge was to provide enough food and equipment to support a massive army invading the thinly populated South. They succeeded admirably; in addition, by upping the ante and wrecking Southern railroads, burning factories and cities, destroying croplands, blocking off Western territories full of potential new recruits, and urging slaves to
revolt, they were able to exert tremendous pressure on the South. The massive hardship and 9,000-percent inflation led to the widespread desertion of Southern soldiers going home to support their families. By 1865 the war’s-end spectacle was not one of a conquering Northern army, but of a South simply collapsing.

America produced the greatest war production machine ever devised: 297,000 planes, 86,000 tanks, 12,000 ships, and enormous quantities of trucks and jeeps, arms, and munitions. “Without American production,” said Joseph Stalin, the Allies “could not have won the war.”

How wars are won: supplying the basics

Said U.S. Admiral Ernest King, “I do not know what this ‘logistics’ stuff is that everyone is talking about, but I want some of it.”

It is instructive that the man chosen to head the Allied Forces in Europe, and who later became the only five-star general since George Washington and Ulysses Grant, was a staff man with no combat experience. Many people wondered how a lowly lieutenant languishing in the bowels of the military bureaucracy—a man so frustrated that he toyed several times with the idea of quitting the Army—could enjoy such a meteoric rise. Dwight Eisenhower was the man of the moment, promoted over such warriors as Omar Bradley and George Patton because of his planning skills and thorough grasp of logistics. Asked to name the military weapons most essential to his success in North Africa and Europe, Eisenhower named four items remarkable for their simplicity: the bulldozer, the jeep, the two-and-a-half-ton truck, and the C-47 transport airplane.

1776–2005
For all the hoopla about bravery and courage of men in combat, one fact about war rarely gets any attention: paying for it. Said George Washington, “In modern wars, the longest
purse must chiefly determine events.” Here is what some of our major wars cost at the time:

To get a perspective on these numbers, consider how little the U.S. paid for the territories of its national expansion during the entire nineteenth century: $140 million.

A more relevant, modern-day statistic is the cost of America’s greatest peacetime victory. The nine-year race to put a man on the moon cost $25 billion.

Note that the war costs cited above are for direct costs. They do not include the hidden expense of pension liabilities. This is where wars get very expensive. This cost first appeared in the Civil War (only for the Northern soldiers—the soldiers of the Confederacy got no pensions). In 1882 the expenditures of the Pension Bureau were $200 million—almost 18 percent of the government budget. In 1889, U.S. (Northern) pension expenditures exceeded the entire government budget before the Civil War.

Wars, if they go on too long, strangle economies. We all know about post–World War I Germany, where hyperinflation got so bad people needed wheelbarrows to carry around enough money to eat. It could never happen here in America, could it? Lest we forget, it has happened—twice.

During the American Revolution, the money used to pay soldiers, called continental scrip, had depreciated to one tenth of one penny per dollar, or 1/1,000 of a dollar (see
Chapter 8
). During the Civil War, the Confederate dollar plummeted in value from ninety cents in June 1861 to twenty cents in February 1863, to one and a half cents in April 1865. The poverty of the South, captured in the movie
Gone With the Wind
, was very real.

Wars not only cause economic havoc and inflation, they cause government debt and personal income taxes.

When James Madison became president in 1809, he inherited a national debt of $57 million. Because of the War of 1812, by 1816 the national debt was $127 million—an increase of $70 million. It took the United States a full twenty years to pay off the $70 million and get the national debt back to the 1809 level. From 1836 to 1845 the national debt got reduced even further, from $57 million to $16 million. Then came the Mexican War, and by 1848 the U.S. had a debt of $63 million. Then came the big explosion: during the Civil War the national debt went from $75 million to $2.8 billion—a thirty-seven-fold increase. In the twenty-four months of U.S. participation in World War I, the national debt grew from $3 billion to $26 billion.

In World War II the U.S. national debt skyrocketed from $16 billion to more than $260 billion, and ushered in a mindset that debts don’t matter because we owe it to ourselves. Once it had gotten used to military debt, the U.S. went on a huge military spending spree for armaments and overseas military bases that caused even Dwight Eisenhower to blanch at the growing military-industrial complex. By the time the Cold War ended when Reagan left office, the national debt was $2.7 trillion. When it came to financing something as important as war, the argument went, debts don’t matter.